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Chapter 5: Method 2: Maintaining a Relationship Focus
Leadership in the complex and multidifferentiated interior world of the corporation brings the inner leader into intimate association with many constituencies other than the traditional core of immediate followers implied in traditional leadership theory. Leaders must relate to and satisfy the needs of all the work communities and individuals who have a stake in the success of the inner leader's work community. These stakeholders, not merely that part of the corporate structure formally assigned to them, define the scope of the inner leader's concern. Leadership in the middle regions of the corporation encompasses a complex array of interests, forces, attitudes, actions, pressures, and values (Suzaki). Leading from the middle asks the leader to acquire different skills, knowledge, and abilities, and capacities that in effect redefine leadership in that relationshipful venue.
Inner leaders accept the notion that they need to be concerned with all the communities that affect their activities. This is a new idea in leadership and is specific to the role of inner leaders. Several forces drive inner leaders toward a stakeholder concept of leadership. For one thing, the driving value in many corporations today is service. And, rapid technological change and the shift to global markets result in short product life-cycles and increased risk of erosion of competitive advantage.
Defining The Leadership Of Relationships
Inner leaders, focusing as they do on work community values, show a commitment to build relationships (Crosby) in both their internal and the larger corporate contexts for the long-term benefit of all stakeholders, including themselves. These leaders find it easier to gain the support they need from their constituents if they build intimate personal long-term relationships with them. Followers vested in such relationships who know they will share fairly will be more willing to sacrifice to insure the work community's survival and prosperity. Stakeholders who have evidence that affirms that the leader views relationships with them as long term and responsive to their evolving needs develop greater loyalty and are willing to provide support during periods of economic, social, or environmental adjustment.
Gardner sees leadership as a relationship characterized by a process of persuasion and example by which leaders induce community members to collective action in accordance with the community's purposes. Undoubtedly, inner leadership is a people-oriented task. Understanding the needs of both parties in this relationship is essential to success. Inner leaders can no longer (if they ever did) be content to learn only about their side of the equation.
Implicit in the leader–follower relationship is the idea of trust. Mutual interactive trust is vital to any work-community action. It bonds all parts of the work community - and individual members - and lets them relate to each other smoothly. Workers want to trust their leaders and inner leaders rely on the good will of workers to do what is needed. Force, authority, formal structural roles, and sanction systems cannot substitute for relationships based on mutual trust. Inner leaders, more than top leaders, are called upon to develop trust relationships with their followers, for that is the only kind of relationship that can maintain itself intact over time and against the attacks of stress, change, and technological encroachments. Such trust relationships are built on many things, among them are the need to articulate clear goals, sound policies, and a basic respect for others. Trust takes place in relationships supportive of factors like these, factors that are sensitive to the needs of both the followers and the leader (Yearout, Miles, and Koonce).
Affiliating with their coworkers in relationships engages inner leaders in more than system, structure, and strategy formation. It involves them also in shaping the social, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of interpersonal work alliances. These latter aspects of work life are more significant and far more susceptible to orchestration by leaders to the benefit of both leaders and followers and to realize goals of the work community they lead.
Methods Of Developing Leadership Relationships
Building successful relationships with coworkers helps insure that both they and the inner leader are more productive. Strong interpersonal relationships increase mutual trust, strengthen competence, enhance self-confidence, and reduce the expenditure of negative energy on protecting self. Productive relationships reduce fear and increase happiness. They encourage inter-dependence and allow coworkers to rely on each other more fully. They reduce the risk to self-image by being open. Such relationships enhances creativity and facilitate introduction of new ideas. Successful relationships support common values and reduce the risk inherent in expressing deeply held values.
Developing Workplace Relationships
Several techniques can be identified to help inner leaders build and maintain strong, mutually beneficial working relationships as the basis for joint work activity. Building strong, trusting relationships also requires that followers come to admire the inner leader. Useful work relationships develop as inner leaders act to create certain characteristics of effective relationships in their work communities, among them the following:
Confidence: Relationships are based on confidence and more (Gibb). They follow unquestioned belief in and reliance on the inner leader based on evidence or experience. Confidence is also developed when the inner leader is seen as worthy of the followers' trust and is seen as reliable. This is a kind of expression of faith in the integrity or strength or the potential behavior of the inner leader (Yearout, Miles, and Koonce).
Open communications: Open interpersonal communications builds relationships
(Santovec).
Shared feelings: Relationships define a condition in which members are willing to share their intimate feelings.
Predictability: Relationships also develop out of situations where individuals can predict with some accuracy what their colleagues will do or say, given a specific behavior, situation, or result.
Low risk: Relationships are is created when the inner leader can decrease the vulnerability one member has to other persons in the relationship (Handy).
Integrity: Trust flows from followers' confidence in the leader's ability, integrity, and ethical fidelity.
Values based: The inner leader's values also influence the development of strong relationships. It is only through direct interaction with the leader's values that followers can develop a deep conviction about the leader or about his or her basic worth.
Reliability: Relationships are strengthened when the inner leader guides followers to believe that what the leader says will eventually come to pass. Relationships form and grow when others have confidence in the dependability of the leader's words or actions.
Truth: Relationships mature as experience proves the essential truth of the follower's initial perceptions about joining in the relationship. It diminishes by the reverse. As people or things are proved to be less than we expected or different from our initial perceptions, we withdraw from the relationship.
Expertise: Relationships develop as followers trust the inner leader's competence and expertise. Followers expect that those they interact with, especially their leaders, will be competent to perform in their roles.
Voluntary acceptance: Joining in relationship with the inner leader is voluntary, noncompulsory, a free-will choice.
Trusteeship: Followers freely interact with their leader when they see that the inner leader assumes a trustee relationship toward them and the work community generally.
Trust: Willingness to relate to the inner leader and the members of the leader's work community results when individual members believe they can bank on their word, promise, or verbal or written statements (Gambetta).
Recognition of the worth of followers: Relationships come together when followers have confidence in the fact that their inner leader values them as people of worth, when they realize that they really matter as individuals (Britton and Stallings).
Productivity: Relationships form when followers believe their leaders can make them effective. Effectiveness is based on the willingness of participants to place themselves in the inner leader's hands, to rely on the leader for some or all of their individual success.
Problem solving: Followers relate to the inner leader when that leader is seen as an effective problem-solver. Only in this circumstance will followers voluntarily allow their leader (or anyone else) to have significance influence on decisions affecting their work life.
Assigning meaning: As inner leaders assign meaning to people, ideas, words, events, or the work community itself, they can develop relationships with others who also seek that meaning.
Free and open information flow: Effective relationships require bilateral transmission of information and understanding. Free-flowing information systems permit reciprocal influence, encourage self-control, and avoid abuse of the vulnerability of members.
Enabling: Followers join their leaders in work relationships when they are given power, authority, and responsibility enough to function independently within the constraints of the work community's vision and values. When the relationships inner leaders create with their followers encourage creativity, intelligence, willingness, and drive, followers will join together in the common work.
Collaboration: As inner leaders develop organizational structures and endeavor to align followers with tasks using commonly agreed-upon goals, mutual interaction, common language, and symbols, joint problem-solving and shared decision-making relationships form.
Contribution: Followers want to make a contribution to worthwhile activity. They will join in relationships when their inner leaders encourage them to work in ways that allow them to make a strong contribution to the work community's tasks and to themselves.
Developing Trust Relationships
Mutual interactive trust is a critical element of any effective work relationship between inner leaders and those led. Handy says to trust is to take a chance on the other person. Trust increases the truster's vulnerability while simultaneously increasing the strength of the relationship. Rogers asserted that leaders can causally link trust to increased originality and emotional stability in their relationships with people. Trust is cyclical. The more leaders trust their followers, the more trusting the relationship becomes. And, alternatively, the more they distrust others, the more distrust is present in the relationship.
While the advantages appear to be numerous, developing a trusting relationship requires maturity and perseverance. It also takes strength. An inner leader cannot demand trust of another. Trust must be earned, developed. Trust is a gift given freely by coworkers because it is based in their confidence in and respect for the leader.
Relationships Obligate Both Parties
Joining in a relationship with followers asks leaders to accept an obligation to the followers, as well as to expect followers to obligate themselves to them. The sense of obligation members of a relationship feel is the foundation of successful relationships. While work-community theory assumes, but largely ignores, the idea of interpersonal relationships, nevertheless it is integral to leader–follower interactivity. Typically, asking followers to be obligated to their leaders and to the in-place structural and process systems is understood and accepted. Less clear, but equally powerful, is the obligation inner leaders assume merely through the act of accepting leadership responsibilities.
Discussion Issues And Questions
Issues
Inner leaders work in relationships built around some common interest directed by the leader.
The relationship is composed of a leader and a follower reiterated for each member of the leader's work community.
The relationship is the primary environment within which inner leadership takes place.
Small group theory helps inner leaders understand the relationship context within which their leadership takes place.
Inner leaders build relationships to gain the support they need from their constituents to prepare them for long-term success.
Stakeholders who have evidence that affirms that the work community views its relationship with them as long term and responsive to their evolving needs develop greater loyalty and may be willing to provide support during periods of economic, social, or environmental adjustment.
Understanding the needs of both parties in the leader–follower relationship is essential to success.
Implicit in the leader–follower relationship is the idea of trust. Mutual interactive trust is vital to any work-community action. Workers must trust their leaders.
Affiliating with their coworkers in relationships engages inner leaders in more than system, structure, and strategy formation and involves them also in shaping the social, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of interpersonal work alliances.
Strong interpersonal relationships increase mutual trust, strengthen competence, enhance self-confidence, and reduce the expenditure of negative energy on protecting self.
Relationships are based on more than confidence; they follow unquestioned belief in and reliance on the inner leader based on evidence or experience.
It is only through direct interaction with the leader's values that followers can develop the deep conviction about the leader or about his or her basic worth necessary to form an intimate relationship.
Relationships mature as experience proves the essential truth of the follower's initial perceptions about joining in the relationship. The reverse diminishes it.
Joining in relationship with the inner leader must be voluntary, noncompulsory, a free-will choice.
Relationships come together when followers have confidence in the fact that their inner leader values them as people of worth, when they realize that they really matter as individuals.
When inner leaders assign meaning to people, ideas, words, events, or the work community itself, they can develop relationships with others who also seek that meaning.
Effective relationships require bilateral transmission of information and understanding. Free-flowing information systems permit reciprocal influence, encourage self-control, and avoid abuse of the vulnerability of members.
Joining in a relationships with followers asks leaders to accept an obligation to their followers, as well as to expect followers to obligate themselves to them.
Questions
Do I regularly take time to assess the relationships that exist in my office?
Do I recognize the natural coalitions that exist in my work community? Do I use them to my advantage?
Do I invest the time to develop professional-quality face-to-face and other relationships with my coworkers?
Have I developed enough people skills to effectively relate with others?
Do I really grasp the power of trust to keep relationships and work communities together?
Do I take the time to watch the processes, interactions, and relationships in the office?
Do I encourage work community, inspire cooperation, mentor, and otherwise shape member behavior to agreed-upon goals often via one-on-one relationships?
Do relationships have a place in measuring my work community's performance?
Am I able to diagnose relationships?
Relationships Learning Activities
Activity 1: Worthiness of Occupations Worksheet
Instructions. Followers must trust the leader before they will be willing to enter a relationship with them.
Below is a list of fifteen occupations. Your task is to rank these occupations in the order of their trustworthiness.
Place a number 1 by the occupation you think is ranked as the most trusted, place a number 2 by the second most trusted occupation, and so forth through the number 15, which is your estimate of the least trusted of the fifteen occupations.
Place your ranking in the left hand column labeled "Your Ranking."
Consensus Ranking Your Ranking by Your Work Community
_____
_____
Executives in large corporations
_____
_____
College professors
_____
_____
U.S. Army generals
_____
_____
Clergymen
_____
_____
Used car salesmen
_____
_____
Physicians
_____
_____
Labor union officials
_____
_____
Lawyers
_____
_____
Auto repairmen
_____
_____
Law enforcement officials
_____
_____
Judges
_____
_____
Politicians
_____
_____
TV or appliance repairmen
_____
_____
Psychologists
_____
_____
TV news reporters
Now rank these fifteen occupations as you think the members of your work community would rank them.
Place this ranking in the second column labeled "Consensus Ranking by Your Work Community."
Compare the two rankings.
About which occupations are you in most agreement with your work colleagues?
About which occupations are you in most disagreement?
What, if any, are the implications of these similarities and differences?
Does your analysis of this questionnaire say anything about the ease inner leaders may have in building relationships in this work community? Explain.
Activity 2: Maintaining a Relationship Focus
Instructions. If information is the lifeblood of organizations, then the arteries and veins through which the information flows are relationships. The new sciences teach us that objects are known only as they relate to others. Inner leaders focus on relationships in all aspects of work-community life because the work community differs from a mere collection of individuals in that members have an influence on each other (Goldstein). Participation with, inclusion of, and respect for people become a natural part of inner leadership. Indeed people hunger for that kind of community.
Discussion Issues
Your coworkers are the "parts" of your work community, and your relationships with these people are the essential building blocks of a flexible and sustainable team? How do you operationalize this fact in your interactions with individual followers?
Do you realize that your vision alone has little value as a descriptor of your work community and that it is the members of the work community that have values and it is they who connect with your vision? How does this realization translate into your specific actions in relations with your followers in assignments of work to individuals? Planning? Program evaluation?
All systems are composed of elements that relate in meaningful ways to each other in unique, nonlinear ways. This demands that your leadership focus on developing interpersonal trust and a concern for the " whole souls" of the people you lead. Do you focus as much time on developing intimate relationships with them that emphasize shared meanings about key work-community values, objectives, and methods as you do assigning work to your coworkers? Be specific in identifying actions you take to build rapport with your followers around task or meaningful relationships.
Activity 3: Building Your Network of Relationships
Instructions. Read carefully the following short statement:
When we build a new relationship, we cannot predict or control exactly what will happen. Yet when we encourage large numbers of new relationships, we know that the flow of information across the organization increases dramatically and doesn't necessarily adhere to departmental or functional boundaries. Encouraging new relationships is fostering and using chaos in the most positive sense.
In traditional organizations, information is often closely guarded - perhaps because managers feel that sharing this information would be dangerous or because they do not want to distract employees from their work or even because access to information is seen as a source of power. But this attitude is counterproductive at a time when flexibility, adaptability, and the ability to rapidly implement new ideas are all essential to success. Several analysts have noted that most successful inner leaders spend 80 to 90 percent of their time out of their offices, talking to all sorts of people in the work community. These successful leaders understand well the value of a wide network of relationships, even though there is no guarantee that any one specific relationship will be useful.
When you build relationships in this way, you are not just getting to know individuals; you are also getting to know the work community itself. You are learning about different perspectives, finding out about events and trends. You are constantly monitoring what is happening and how things are working. This informal stream of information is critical to leadership in the middle of the corporation.
The way you network will depend on your personality and how you function in your role as an inner leader. You may stop by people's workstations or invite them to your home for dinner. The key is that you are out networking in the work community.
Take a position either in opposition to the ideas expressed here or in support if it.
Develop an argument supporting your position using materials from this chapter, your experience, and library references.
Prepare a short essay elaborating on your argument and illustrating them from your work experience.
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